Not yet, since you ask. And I doubt if I ever will. My aversion to multiplex cinemas, with their cheerless foyers and their hordes of texting, tweeting cola-hydrated popcorn-gobblers, has deterred me from seeing new movies lately. The King’s Speech eluded me until it arrived, in its original form as a play, in the West End. You know the plot: stammering monarch makes boob-free speech. What’s striking is that the writer David Seidler has managed to hang his entire drama, and by implication the destiny of Britain, on such a footling little crisis. His script is a tad short on analysis. We learn the facts of Bertie’s troubled childhood — the bullying, the leg braces and the suppression of his left-handedness — and we’re expected to join the dots and conclude that these woes triggered his stammer. How, exactly, we’re never told.
The minor historical figures are as sketchy as Enid Blyton characters rewritten by Jeffrey Archer. Ian McNeice’s Churchill waddles about charmingly like a sort of Teletubby blessed with Ciceronian eloquence. Edward VIII (Daniel Betts) is a feckless rotter in search of a tyrant to adore: Hitler, Wallis, it’s all the same to him. Michael Feast, as the Archbishop of Canterbury, has added too many feathers and bells to his portrayal of the snobbish, scheming cleric. One of the perils of a lengthy tour is that the actors, without the director’s restraining hand, can amplify their performances and encroach on territory that belongs to others.
No such excesses from Joss Ackland as George V. In earlier times Ackland’s velvety bass voice was one of the wonders of the trade. Everyone who heard it was captivated instantly. His vocal power has diminished a bit nowadays but he’s still pretty good as the aging king who, if not quite on his deathbed, is thinking of tucking himself in soon. Odd that he wears a trim goatee beard. Completely wrong. Much too Bohemian. All his life George V wore full whiskers and a sprouting moustache, with the wing-span of a heron at take-off, which was the fashion during his youth in the 1880s.
The play’s chief interest lies in the weird, joshing relationship between the precious prince and his blunt, cynical speech therapist. The character of Bertie and his absurdly circumscribed social position seems entirely authentic. Victorian etiquette had encouraged royals to regard themselves as semi-divinities whose person was sacrosanct and whose inferiors were expected to observe an exclusion zone of five paces in their presence. All that rings horribly true. But it’s harder to believe in Lionel Logue’s demotic, upfront blokeishness. Would an obscure Aussie quack have had the poise, or the gall, to treat the second-in-line with such dictatorial chumminess? Probably not. But this doesn’t mar the play at all because it operates on the plane of myth rather than fact.
The story is a tremulous web of make-believe, a fairy tale of self-discovery in an era of social repression. It’s Pygmalion in reverse. The prince, rendered powerless by an accident of birth, must achieve a spiritual awakening and learn the speech-modes of the ruling class, embodied by the radio mike, in an age of mass communication. This fable has a potency that is hard to explain. I went on a Monday night, the slow end of the week, and the house was full of play-goers who presumably knew the story, the characters and the ending in advance. Weird, I have to say, but it worked its magic on me too. I loved it.
A Warsaw Melody, the tale of a forbidden affair between a Pole and a Russian, has delighted European audiences for decades. Finally it arrives here. Why the delay? Perhaps because Leonid Zorin’s play ignores a key convention of romantic drama: wreck the affair as soon as possible. In Romeo and Juliet, the lovers’ families are sworn enemies. In True Romance, the young friskers are on the run from ruthless assassins. In Brief Encounter, the would-be couple are already married and have to gaze at each other with thwarted longing like randy lions in a zoo. Vandalising the romance doesn’t just add drama, of course, it spares us the ordeal of watching the pair getting lovey-dovey together. Amorous bliss is revolting.
Romantic disaster is fascinating and Zorin’s decision to spend half his play on the happiest (and therefore most repugnant) phase of the affair is peculiar. But the story has charm. And it acquires depth after the couple are thrust apart following a decree of 1946 forbidding Russians from marrying foreigners. Oliver King is excellent as Victor, a wine-maker who specialises in copycat Soviet claret. Emily Tucker is skittishly alluring as a Warsaw singer destined for professional glory and personal disaster. I wish I’d joined this upside-down production after the interval. The couple’s happiness is a bit much. But their ruin is captivating.
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